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When US President-elect Joe Biden talked about his Mumbai connection

Biden reiterated his claim two years later at an event in Washington, saying there are five Bidens living in Mumbai.

When US President-elect Joe Biden talked about his Mumbai connection
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Shocking but true! Joe Biden does have a connection to Mumbai. His great, great, great, great, great grandfather had worked in the East India Company. It all started when Biden got a letter in the year 1972 from someone by the last name of Biden from Mumbai. At that time, Joe Biden had just become the youngest senator. 

The envelope of the letter that Joe Bidden had received contained the postal stamp of GPO Bombay and in it, Leslie Duncan Biden alias LD Biden, had congratulated him on getting elected to the Senate and informed him about their connection.

Leslie was based in Nagpur, but since his letter had flown via Bombay, he would not only be etched in Joe Biden’s memory as ‘Biden from Mumbai’, but also become his go-to ice-breaker story in meetings with Indian-Americans and Indian leaders.

When US President-elect Joe Biden was in India's financial capital on July 24, 2013, he had told the audience that his distant relatives live in Mumbai. At this juncture, he also went off-script in his address at the Bombay Stock Exchange to express his regret that he never followed up on the letter. He had informed the audience that he was yet to call his Mumbai relatives but was planning to do so.

"It's an honour to be back in India and to be here in Mumbai. Off script for a second here, I was reminded I was elected to the United States Senate when I was a 29-year-old kid back in 1972, and one of the first letters I received and I regret I never followed up on it.

"Maybe, some genealogist in the audience can follow up for me, but I received a letter from a gentleman named Biden - Biden, my name - from Mumbai, asserting that we were related," Joe Biden had told the Mumbai audience seven years ago.

Biden reiterated his claim two years later at an event in Washington, saying there are five Bidens living in Mumbai.

"There are five Bidens in Mumbai, India," Biden, then Vice President, told a Washington audience in 2015 at an event organised by the Confederation of Indian Industry and Carnegie Endowment for International Peace on the occasion of the 10th anniversary of India-US civil nuclear deal, according to PTI.

In his 2015 speech in Washington, the President-elect had claimed that his great, great, great, great, great grandfather George Biden was a Captain in the East India Trading company and after retirement, decided to settle in India and married an Indian woman.

An article in an online paper claims that Leslie — who passed away in 1983 — had received a reply from Joe Biden nine years after he wrote the letter. LD Biden, the paper states, was an Anglo-Indian whose father was a photographer and whose brother went to England after India gained Independence. He married a woman from Goa and they had two sons and four daughters. Three of his daughters live abroad, while three other children passed away recently.

Leslie’s four grandchildren — who are based in Nagpur and working in other cities — are probably the only Bidens left in India and have so far not made any claims of being linked to Joe Biden.

The 77-year-old Democrat set to take oath as the 46th US President in just over two months and we hope he pays another visit to the island city. 

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